Brief Encounter

Shanghai Noon, directed by Tom Dey from a script by Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, is a spoof- Western in the manner of Blazing Saddles but with two main differences from Mel Brooks’s classic. One is that it is 26 years further away from the sort of conventions of the genre that Blazing Saddles was…

Six Days, Seven Nights, directed by Ivan Reitman, tries and does not completely fail to be an old- fashioned sort of romantic comedy. Anne Heche plays Robin Monroe, deputy editor of a New York fashion magazine who meets cute with Harrison Ford as Quinn Harris, a crusty old souse of a pilot living the life…

Well, here goes. The following, I know, is an invitation to hate-mail, but I have to say that Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas, demonstrates a remarkable paucity of imagination. The thought first came to me in the scene where Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) explains to Queen Amidala…

Blue Streak, directed by Les Mayfield, reminded me a little of the extremely disturbing Austrian film, Funny Games, reviewed here last year, in that it leads us up the garden path of cinematic convention, then whirls around and cries: “Only kidding!” Nothing is what we thought it was. But where Michael Haneke, the sadist responsible…

Another unsuccessful attempt at the movie that tried to identify Death with Fate and got tangled up in its own metaphysics. But several accidental demises are very cool.

The arrogance of the evil Disney empire as it colonizes the world, both in space and in time, on behalf of spoiled American pre-teens continues. Characteristically, it has chosen for its next property to be conquered and laid waste a peculiarly inappropriate vehicle in Tarzan. The story of Tarzan, that is, absolutely depends on the…